Project Battuta is an interdisciplinary research initiative to investigate the potential of emerging technologies and geospatial information resources to bring new functionalities to mobile field data collection. Research projects are underway in four main areas:

Infrastructure designs to support use of geospatial information in heterogeneous mobile field computing environments

Scientific software tools for sampling and conflation in limited field computing environments

Wearable computing environments and interface designs

Methodological approaches to using and collecting geospatial data in federal statistical surveys

Research is being prototyped and explored using a testbed environment. A variety of geospatial data sources have been assembled for a small area in Iowa that is undergoing urban development and experiencing a reduction in wetlands and prime farmland.

The concepts created under Project Battuta are being developed with environmental and demographic applications in mind. The infrastructure design readily extends to less structured information gathering settings such as crisis management and law enforcement.